Ingroup-outgroup self-serving bias

there’s a tension between (a) wanting to believe that people who disagree with us aren’t so smart or successful and (b) wanting to believe that our opponents are successful because of external factors such as wealth, social status, and rhetorical ability. Liberals as well as conservatives can be torn, I think, between (a) thinking of their political opponents as pitiful losers, and (b) resenting the other side for having all sorts of unearned advantages.

It reminded me of an earlier discussion regarding Tomislav Sunic, who offended some Nordicists when he suggested Mediteraneans are closer to the ideal male type. As I noted, everyone seems to think they themselves represent the happy medium, even an “extremist” like Lawrence Auster. I’ll add this also applies to libertarians who view themselves as borrowing a little from the left and a little from the right. Those radicals who thoroughly reject the left & right for what they see as their own orthogonal position are of course going to prize ideological purity & independence. As Charles Murray noted regarding who wants to be an elephant, sometimes groups agree on traits they ascribe to each other but apply different connotations. Yuri Slezkine writes that of Mercurians and Apollonians in “The Jewish Century”. A caution for accepting as true such areas of overlap, the same phenomena was observed with the Rattlers & Eagles in the Robber’s Cave experiment.

Unrelated to those posts but related to an earlier discussion on the decline of SNL, Fabio Rojas at orgtheory wonders how such a crappy show survived so long and declares it fits in the “garbage can model” of organization. I have to say, I missed out on the golden era of Mad TV he refers to, it was always the inferior imitation when I watched and I hadn’t even realized it was gone.

Unrelated even to that, Adam Ozimek finds evidence supporting the revealed preference camp over the behavioral economics crowd on high interest loans. I’ve always been a big fan of revealed preference (foot-vote anyone?), so kudos to him. If he ever reports evidence against it I will virulently denounce him.

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12 Responses to “Ingroup-outgroup self-serving bias”

It seems like most arguments about globally dominant traits/attributes come from a very strong selection bias. It is just true that everybody has a higher probability of attracting other people who prefer their “type”. For instance, every women I have ever dated has stated that they prefer dark haired men. Guess what I look like.

But it also goes the other way. People tend to associate/mate with other people based on an ad-hoc expected social status calculation. In other words, we tend to be more attracted to people we think will be more attracted to us. And the simplest model for predicting who will be attracted to us is people who “look” like we do. This is also why people tend to be more attracted to others who share their beliefs and cultural preferences. Of course individuals have preferences that deviate from this pattern, but the most reliable strategy is to find like minded and bodied people.

So we not only prefer, on average, people like ourselves, but also know more people who prefer people like ourselves. It would make sense that we all think our group is the most desirable.

I find the libertarian attempt to appeal to progressives, to portray themselves as something utterly different from Republicans and conservaitves, mostly disingenuous. But it’s mostly a matter of not being self-aware – not taking the “outside view” – rather than mistaken ideas about ideological overlap.

(John Stossel has a new show on Fox Business Channel, incidentally.)

Progressives may often be confused about the distinction between corporatism and laissez-faire (and thus the distinction between a neo-conservative and a libertarian), yes, but the confusion on the part of libertarians about what a progressive is surely must support the idea that everyone thinks they’re admirably independent and misunderstood. Any given self-described progressive probably has a set of ideas as nuanced and difficult to pigeonhole as any libertarian’s, and also as insistent that Republicrats and the mainstream discourse are framing the wrong debates and asking the wrong questions.

Nonetheless that progressive, in the mind of the modal libertarian, is part of an amorphous blob of lefties that are ignorant of spontaneous order, dislike people in business, and ready to sacrifice individual freedom to green causes. You know, Democrats. You know, liberals.

(Someone like, say, Anthony Gregory, is so focused on war and empire that he is better able to escape the perception of being “just another Republican” by his strategy of being a single issue rebel.)

Of course all of the above is without citation, being only my impression, from Facebook etc.

SNL has rebounded in recent years with the casting of younger talent like Andy Samberg. Almost anything he does on that show goes viral.

The link to revealed preference. I don’t see why the finding can’t be construed as behavioral econ vs. behavioral econ. If you ask someone about taking a loan (weeks before they do) and they tell you interest rates are too high, that they don’t really need it, etc., I imagine they will TELL you the opposite on the day they take the loan out.

It’s like Thaler and Sunstein’s “hot” and “cold” false dichotomy. The reality is always “hot,” as we are emotional and cultural creatures driven fundamentally by biological impulses. Guilt is not a “cold” (rational) state anymore than unabashed hedonism.

Liberalism is associated with more cosmopolitanism, whereas conservatism (at least the kind favored by the Front Porch Republicans) prefers that people be rooted in a place & community. I’m reminded of Roland Fryer’s social capital explanation of acting white. My old post on diversity also discusses that social capital.

Liberalism is associated with more cosmopolitanism, whereas conservatism (at least the kind favored by the Front Porch Republicans) prefers that people be rooted in a place & community.

Funny that Hitler and Stalin hated the Jews because the Jews were too modern, rootless and cosmopolitan, no?

Today, the Kevin MacDonald led intellectuals, researchers, academics, and scholars demand American Jews be exterminated for being too tribalistic and rooted.

There’s just no pleasing some people.

In any event, it’s clear that Hitler and Stalin had a much better understanding of the nature of Jews than KMac.

I don’t know about you, but despite my being a rightist, I think America is much better off with the cultural influence of cosmopolitan Jews like Larry David and Rachel Weisz than we would be with the likes of hyperethnocentric rightwing Jews such as Netanyahu and Avigore Lieberman.

Personally, I’m sympathetic to the FPR communitarians and I prefer Zionism (or ultra-Orthodox Judaism) to globalism. I just don’t think that should get tangled up with American policy (George Washington gave good advice). I don’t know who Weisz is, but I’m happy to have Larry David, Einstein and other cosmopolitan Jews if they can similarly tolerate folks who are less cosmpolitan. Call me a squish, but I can’t decisively reject my Whig or Tory side, leaving me with a particular universalism.